JUBILATION LEEEE!!1! (cracklepaf) wrote in mutanthaven, @ 2009-10-10 19:31:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | jubilation lee, plot: power outage |
no i just don't wanna, so i'm walking away [narrative]
[backdated to the 2nd]
Jubilee was not one of those gifted with common sense. She had plenty of other skills -- mass consumption of sugar-based substances with little negative effect, for example, or, more pertinently, how to hotwire economy-sized cars. She had stubbornly stayed in the hotel all day, locked in her room, swallowing down increasing bouts of nausea and attempting to sleep off dizziness. Not that sleeping helped, really: it was part of the problem in the first place.
She saw things at night, whenever things got too dark, when there were loud noises or sudden clouds of dust. Quiet rooms sounded like cascading rubble, and the steady, snuffling crying of a little boy into his mother's side. Sometimes, when she stepped wrong, she could feel the unsteady chunk of mall floor shifting under her feet. When she tried to tell people, they were too busy; come back later, Jubilee, they were doing Important Things. The words wouldn't even come out anymore, changed between head and mouth from "help me" to "fuck you;" and each rebuff made her all the more convinced that that word-change was the right one.
Hotwiring a car while still fighting off lingering nausea was not the easiest task, but Jubilee liked to think she had grace under pressure. Or something. She'd only been out of the hotel an hour or so -- it hadn't taken too long to find a suitable car to jack -- and every so often things would swim in front of her eyes; but dammit, she was going to get to Disneyland. If nothing else was constant, if nobody else had time for her because she was just some dumb kid, by God as her witness, Space Mountain would never break her heart. Except that one time it was under repairs for like three years. Whatever. The point was, she couldn't go to the mall and that was that.
The wires were getting blurry. She used to be able to do this in ten seconds flat; the hotel had really made her soft. Maybe she should have waited until the affects of the power whosawhatsit had worn off; but the lines had Disneyland were awful in the afternoon. She had to beat the crowds. Churros were calling. And some guy in a Daffy Duck costume. And Splash fucking Mountain. And Asian tourists! She'd be among her countrymen. It would be so great, if only she could see the goddamn cord to cut--
She rolled over onto her side and threw up onto the pavement outside the car. The usual immediate after-nausea relief didn't come, and Jubilee threw up again. She had never been good at dealing with illness, and she wasn't sure how long she sat curled up on the floor of the car, her head drooped over the side and legs flopped awkwardly onto the sidewalk. She really wished Rogue was there, or Morgan, or Logan. There was a laundry list of people she wanted there at that moment, which was about when she realized she didn't really want to go to Disneyland, and about when the policeman nudged her leg with his foot.
She flopped onto one shoulder and looked up at a thirty-something black guy, staring down at her with something like disgust and amusement.
"Think there are better places to puke, kid," he said.
"Not one with such nice legroom," she said weakly. "What the fuck, who calls the cops around here, anyway?"
He huffed and smiled at the same time, like he'd seen small Asian girls puking in Honda Civics a hundred times before, and gotten to see the more endearing side of it. "This car's got a silent alarm."
"Oh."
The cop pulled the cuffs off his belt. "Okay, kid. Get out of the car."